2016/17 Contributors

Anna Lafrentz is committed to the transformation of art, music and culture into clean drinking water . She studied art history and art education and spent a year in Sweden (Lund). Since 2012 she is active at Viva con Agua de Sankt Pauli e.V. Together with the collective she organizes the social art, music and cultural festival "Millerntor Gallery“. There she is responsible for the mediation, education, communication and cultural programme. Her favorite topics are "Art in Context of Development Cooperation" and "Aesthetics and Politics".

25hours must grow. Henning " the product developer" (born 1978) ensures that any new hotels, wherever they are in the world, still have the individuality and spirit that is expected from 25hours. The challenge of his job is to manage different interests of all participating groups during the development projects. Education and previous employers: Hotel Louis C. Jacob Hamburg, Savoy Hotel London UK, Kempinski Hotel Bristol Berlin.

Alisa Türck works for the independent agency group pilot. She started her professional career in 2000 as a consultant for the online agency add2 GmbH in Dusseldorf. In 2003 she joined pilot 1/0 in Hamburg working as a consultant in the digital unit. In 2011 she became managing director at pilot Hamburg being responsible for strategic consulting projects of well-known FMCG brands as well as clients from various industries. Since 2015 she has also been in charge of the overall digital business of the pilot group.

Arne works as Director of Mobile Product at XING, the leading professional social network in the German speaking markets. Currently his role includes guiding the company’s shift to a distributed mobile product development. Arne is co-organizer of Product Tank Hamburg, a networking event for local product people and has been playing bass in Hamburg bands Jullander and Pau for 20 years. He’s married and has two daughters.

Jon spends his days working with clients to help them achieve the desired impact with their digital endeavors. By working in the borderlands between user needs and business goals Jon tries to ensure that both perspectives becomes the focus of his projects.

Jon has degrees in both behavioral science and interaction design. For the past 12 years he’s been working at inUse, one of Swedens oldest and largest UX-firms. Jon has also spent 1,5 years in Dubai, helping start up a UX-consultancy.

In his spare time Jon enjoys a good game of football, preferably with a beer or just hanging out in his garden with his wife and two daughters.

At Media Evolution Pernilla work close with the member community (400 organizations) and develop concepts for meetings, knowledge sharing and collaborations. She meets many people on daily basis and really enjoy to connect people with each other.

Le Beau Bureau delivers select management services for artists. Bands, musicians and other culture-related professionals benefit from Le Beau Bureau's excellent contacts, thought-through strategies and smart concepts. The aim of Le Beau Bureau is to bolster their clients up and open new doors for them. We offer our premium services to artists who know what they want and who seek to make full use of their potential. As simple as that.

Lars Hinrichs is Founder and CEO of Cinco Capital, a private equity fund that invests in European and American tech companies. In 2003 he founded XING, a highly successful business networking platform. As Founder and CEO, Lars oversaw its IPO in 2006, making XING the world’s first Web 2.0 company to go public. In 2010 he founded HackFwd, an innovative pre-seed investment company that supported Europe’s most passionate geeks in launching the world’s most exciting tech startups. Lars is an active member of the Young Global Leaders (YGL) of the World Economic Forum and the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO). Since 2013 he is a member of the Advisory Board of Deutsche Telekom AG. His latest project is the Apartimentum, a smart home in Hamburg.

Jimdo co-founder Fridtjof Detzner has a rare sort of idealism, even within the startup community. His drive extends beyond just making a great product, together with co-founders Christian Springub and Matthias Henze, Fridtjof is focused on building an independent, forward thinking, and sustainable company. With no exit strategy in sight.

Franziska has worked in Hamburg as a business and brand strategist over the last eight years with a focus on FMCG, retail, media, transport, pharma, and energy.

After graduating from the University of Applied Science Pforzheim with a Diploma in business, marketing and communications, Franziska Luh launched her career in strategic planning at the agency Philipp und Keuntje in Hamburg. Her clients included Jägermeister, German Yellow Pages, Audi, and Germany’s leading discount energy brand. In 2008 she expanded her international portfolio and attended the Miami Ad School, where she was trained in new planning techniques. Her clients included Ford, Vinyard Vines, and JetBlue Airways.

Finally, before co-founding Katalysten, Franziska Luh worked with the international agency Scholz & Friends for five years strategically advising major clients, such as Muller, Tchibo, as well as project-based managing brand building and development, and driving innovation for various Blue Chip companies.

Ole Keding is Innovation Manager for the independent agency group pilot and lecturer at University of Hamburg. He learned how disruption works at MTV and Warner Music at a time where video killed the radio star before it was killed by the web. Being an always curious multi-disciplinarist he later worked as a grafic designer, travelled europe as a dj and consulted brands freelance before following a scientific path in politics, communication and organizational psychology resulting in a phD as well as a book release. His thoughts circle around strategy, sustainability, creativity and complexity and he loves working in teams with methods driven by research and design thinking.

Up until May 2016 Martin has worked as a creative director for Commerce Plus, the digital commerce focused subsidiary of the sinnerschrader group. His key responsibility was the creative part in developing consumer-facing transactional platforms for national and international clients.

With more than 15 years of knowledge in the agency environment, Martin moved on to XING, to gain new experiences and skills within an agile product environment. In his new roll as a UX team lead for the ProJobs unit, he found what he was looking for. Martin is responsible for the job seeking experience over all of XINGs touch points.

He lives with his wife, daughter and son in the countryside of hamburg. Martin loves running, riding his road bike, basketball and skateboarding.

Christin is passionate about connecting people to do something meaningful.In her she contributes as API Partner Manager to XING, the leading professional social network in the German speaking markets. She is also currently leading the Hamburg spin-off of Berlin based Refugees on Rails to connect refugees and Ruby on Rails developers for a long-term workshop in great locations all over Hamburg. Christin fancies her husband and two children as well as volleyball and craft beer.

Helena works as a freelance creative coach, communication consultant and writer. Her ultimate source of inspiration in everything she does: Encounters. Snapshots. Discoveries. Ordinary and exceptional ones. At home and throughout the world. That’s her space for creativity, and that’s also what inspired her first book: they would rock – 59 days in Iran.

Ina loves exploring how technological innovations are influencing and changing people’s behaviours. She is a trained journalist with working experience in Germany as well as in New Zealand (Axel Springer, Fairfax) and has a background in cultural anthropology.

For almost five years she has been working at the digital agency SinnerSchrader. As Chief Editor, she is now responsible for the reknown European tech conference NEXT, where people of different backgrounds share their thoughts on digital trends and transformational products.

Christophe founded precious design studio 10 years ago together with friends and enjoys every single day since then, no matter if delight or struggle crosses their road. precious helps innovators shape meaningful products and services that people love to interact with. Before that, he worked at some design agencies, ran a record label and released his ownelectronic music. He loves his two kids and their mother more than anything else and is on a that permanent mission to find the perfect work-life blend.

Head and face of tvino.de is the 1982-born sommelier Stephanie Döring, who - has deliberately chosen a new way to convey "wine without dress code" and to lead the wine culture in a new future - coming from the top gastronomy. (Louis C. Jacob, Hamburg, Gordon Ramsay, London) By personally curated by its range of wines and sparkling wines from all over the world responded tvino.de always in close dialogue with its customers to meet their needs; this also includes the creation of own brands. Since November 2014 tvino.de gets with the opening of its first "wine shop" in Hamburg St. Pauli another visibility - offline as sales area and wine bar, which fills an important gap in the Hamburg gastronomy culture with its pure concept. Customers and guests will find the "wine shop" an ever-changing selection of wines from the entire range of tvino.de, new to taste and drink in a relaxed atmosphere, make a date or networking. The "wine shop" relies on the pure quality of the discoveries of tvino.de - no white tablecloths or chandeliers. The focus of new wine trends and events associated with exceptional winemakers.

Richard is the owner of a web-development company based in Malmö called Adda Mig AB and enjoys creating solutions with great impact for customers. He is also co-founder of the startup AddCreators that gives creative individuals the ability to help companies with creating posts for their social media, and get paid per post.

Ulrike Parson is the founder and CEO of parson AG. The company was founded in 2006 in Hamburg and is specialized in technical communication, knowledge management and technical consulting. Ulrike's areas of expertise are developer documentation and content strategy.

Martin is working in the borderland between culture, digital development and business. He loves to explore what happens when content and design of all kinds are combined with new technological opportunities.

Martin’s background is in music. In the beginning of the century he ran music clubs and festivals and founded a music label. Together with six other indie labels he worked on reinventing how music could be consumed online. He debated the possibilities publicly, did a speaking tour with the founder of The Pirate Bay and spoke in the Swedish parliament.

In recent years, Martin has worked as an researcher at the Swedish organization Media Evolution writing publications on topics such as crowdfunding, collaborative consumption and gamification. For the past five years he’s been the Program Director of the internationally acclaimed conference The Conference. He has also worked as a business developer at the social micropayment service Flattr.com and still runs the music label Songs I Wish I Had Written.

The Product Field was developed by Wolfgang Wopperer Beholz, Co-Founder mindmatters and betahaus Hamburg, Klaus-Peter Frahm, Head of Business Development news aktuell and Michael Schieben, partner at precious design studio.

Fanny works as at the innovation platform Media Evolution in the Southern Sweden. On daily basis she working with communication and coordinating projects and activities for their community. A community that wants to develop together in the age on digital transformation. She love to use her creative side to design new ways of concept and formats for knowledge sharing, collaborations and innovative activities.

Media Evolution is a innovation/development platform and a community for the digital businesses that organize "The Conference" and runs the meeting place and co-working space Media Evolution City in Malmö. The member base consists of 400 companies, organizations, universities, regions and cities in the southern part of Sweden. The community comes from various industries that want to develop with those working in the digital front. Annually Media Evolution create meeting places for 25 000 participants in forums for seminars, workshops, talks, conferences as well as platforms for articles and knowledge sharing.

Rainer is doing swedish communication design as a freelancer for small companies and institutions. »Swedish« means a friendly, well-structured and functional design and co-working with his clients, too. In addition to that he loves to connect designers by organizing events such as the InDesign User Group Hamburg. His passion is to rise the appreciation of design by politics, the economy and the society.

Varelsen, The Creature in English, is a small Malmö based creative studio working mainly with animation, film and motion graphics. The studio consist of four individuals with a long background in arts, music and advertising. As a group, Varelsen has existed since 2008, but some of us met all the way back in 1997 while studying graphic design. Explaining Varelsen to an outsider is like trying to explain the quantum entanglement theory to a fork, but the short version is that aside from working on commercial productions all of us are heavily involved in several personal passion products such as gaming, skateboarding, music and carpentry. To name a few...

Event organizer at by day, product geek by night. At Foo Café in Malmö Martin helps companies understand the power of meetups and knowledge sharing. He also runs the local ProductTank user group, driving discussions on product management, business strategies, analytics and more. When not working, you'll likely find him coding on a web project or out for a mind-cleansing run.

Designer and music label executive. Working and playing with new ideas within the fields of design, media and pop culture.

Co-founded the experimental design bureau Studio Pop in January 2013. Studio Pop offers new-thinking design and art direction for modern clients. The main focus is projects within the creative and cultural industries. Opening up a new gallery/studio/lab space for public events this fall.

Co-Founded the Swedish music label Hybris, with offices in Malmö, Stockholm and Hongkong. Since the start in 2004, Hybris has discovered and developed some of Scandinavia’s most acclaimed pop artists and grown from being a small ‘promising’ Swedish pop label to a free independent player on the global music scene.